The disclosure is related to the field of automatic classification of items in an application program, such as electronic mail (email) messages in an email application.
It is known to apply classification or categorization to items in application programs. In an email program, for example, emails may be sorted or categorized by action of a user-created “rule” specifying categorization criteria. Rules are created using a structured rule-creating utility of the application program. A user is presented with a display panel containing various fields of email messages, such as sender, recipient, subject, etc., and the user enters names, addresses, phrases or other text values and then saves the rule. The rule can be applied automatically based on events such as receiving a new email, sending a new email, etc. As a simple example, a user can create a rule specifying that emails received from a particular sender be moved to a specified folder. The rule helps the user to efficiently organize the messages in a desired manner.